Recent updates in the Ripple vs SEC case brought some more positives for the cryptocurrency network team
AGAIN, the US SEC has faced a blow from Ripple labs after the official judge looking over the case made a ruling. After ruling out by the judge, a lawyer of the Ripple community called it a very big win for Ripple.
Recalling the whole case, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple and its executives, officer Brad Garlinghouse and Christian Larsen, in 2020, accusing them of selling unregistered securities. Judge Sarah Netburn, who looked over the case proceedings, denied the request of the Security and Exchange Commission to reconsider the documents to shield under privilege.
The document mentioned by the SEC was related to a speech made by the director of SEC, William Hinman, in June 2018. While speaking in his speech, he said that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. The SEC argues that they are concerned only about personal views of Hinman and not the agency’s policies. Hence, it did not object to those documents falling outside deliberative process privilege (DPP) protection.
The deliberative process privilege makes the documents free in a case for being disclosed by any governmental entity to be reviewed confidentially for existing policy based on the material provided or contained in the documents.
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Subsequently, the SEC changed its focus to argue that the speech showed the policies of Ripple Labs rather than personal views of Hinman and should be shielded according to that. Judge Sarah Netburn said that the agency should not refute itself while trying to intertwine its confidence.
Judge Netburn wrote that the SEC was seeking to have it in both ways, but the Speech of Hinman was either having intentions to reflect the agency’s policies, or it was not. Now the SEC could not reject or refute its position while insisting that the documents reflected only the personal views of Hitman.
Overall the critical aspects that Judge Sarah Netburn’s rejection has brought to reconsider and Ripple community defense lawyer who has an extensive case file of the SEC vs financial cases, James K. Filan tweeted that summed up the whole situation that ‘this is a very big win for Ripple.’ Another lawyer of the Ripple crypto community and founder of CryptoLaw, John Deaton said that the SEC is not in a hurt locker.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/04/13/what-ripple-claims-a-very-big-win-in-the-case-against-sec/